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A New Nike Baseball Glove That Comes Broken In

Nike's Vapor 360 fielding glove is ready to use straight out of the box—no break in required.

This is thanks to a combination of using a hyperfused synthetic web and a perforated leather palm.

The Nike Flywire lacing system decreases weight. Nike's previous baseball glove was around 680 grams, this one is around 585 grams.

The palm perforations for pre-broken down leather.

Back in the day, breaking in your baseball glove was a summer rite of passage. There were all sorts of tricks for softening the stiff hunk of leather—you’d stick it in the oven, run it over with a car, stash it under your mattress while you sleep.

Nike is looking to make that process obsolete. The company just came out with the Vapor 360 glove, and Nike says it’s ready to use from the moment you put it on. “It was always one of our top priorities that this glove would be game ready out of the box,” says Matthew Hudson, a senior designer at Nike. “We all agreed that the break in process of a regular glove was a problem we needed to solve.”

Full leather gloves, while durable and effective once broken in, are still pretty heavy. Nike wanted to reduce the effort a player exerts by lightening the entire glove and replacing the bulk of leather with more synthetic, reactive materials. To do this, the designers looked to Nike’s footwear division for inspiration.

Nike

The glove uses the same heat-welding technology that you find in Nike's running and basketball shoes—which Nike dubs "Hyperfuse." That process allows materials to joined up, Frankenstein-like, so that each bit of fabric can be selected for whatever's most important at its own particular location. Thus, the panel of the glove is nearly seamless and made of lightweight materials. The palm is still made of leather. Look closely and you’ll see little perforations, which accelerate the breaking process to the point of it being ready to use right away.

Nike’s innovation kitchen, the branch of the company working on its more forward-thinking technologies, has been investigating how to make a baseball glove with no leather. They’ve been trying to find a synthetic material that mimics the molding capabilities of leather but in a lighter form, but they realized it’s still hard to beat leather for the palm portion of the glove. “Until we find a synthetic that can mold like a natural skin, leather is superior,” says Hudson.

Nike's previous baseball glove weighs in at around 680 grams; this one is around 585 grams. “You can feel that difference straight away,” says Jeremy Hewitt, a product line manager at Nike. Lighter might mean faster performance, but it makes you wonder, how durable is this glove anyway? “It’s not an heirloom, it’s a performance machine that you pull out of the box and it’s ready to go right off the lot,” says Hewitt. “We like to say it’s not the Harley Davidson, it’s the Ducati.”